False Witness~Andrew Grant | Review

Title: False Witness (Detective Cooper Deveraux #3)
Author: Andrew Grant
Genre: Suspense
Release: January 2018

A copy of this novel was received through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review

Set in Birmingham, Alabama in the present day, the story involves the murder of two young women (and, later, a third) on their twenty-first birthdays. The only thing they seemed to have had in common was that they had both had babies that were given up for adoption at birth, and that they died on their twenty-first birthdays. Cooper Devereaux is the lead detective on the case. Devereaux is dealing with his own demons as he works his way through the evidence and the witness interviews to solve his case. His father had been a known criminal who had been killed by the police when Cooper was a child himself. The trauma resulting from his traumatic learning of his father’s death, and of his criminal record, led to a troubled childhood for young Devereaux. Thankfully, he was helped by the cop who had handled his father’s case, even to the extent of sponsoring Cooper’s entry into the Birmingham Police Academy. Unfortunately, Alexandra, his girlfriend and mother of his daughter Nicole, has learned of his troubled past and left him for the second time after an eight-year separation to think things through. 

The story is well-told. The action is consistently fast-paced. Because of the beginning of the novel readers will be pretty certain they know who the murderer is, but this is a police procedural story, and the police have not figured it out yet. At least, readers might think they know the identity of the killer. But they can’t really be sure. The author keeps us guessing right up to the end of the story, which has a few plot twists. The plot is easily able to hold your interest as Devereaux and his partner, working with an FBI agent and more-senior police officers grind through the complex, and sometimes contradictory, evidence. Unfortunately, more innocents must die before the murders are solved, but Devereaux does everything in his power to prevent that.